In the nineteenth century Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of his train journey across the then still nearly pristine Plains in tones of awe and wonder: "We were at sea...it was a world almost without feature; an empty sky and an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horion, like a cue across a billiard board."

Grasses would have to be the most underappreciated and unseen of the great North American landforms--moving from the tallgrass prairies of the Eastern plains to the shortgrass prairies of the West, they are the central feature as well as the empty spot in a vast and ancient landscape. The hugeness of the sky above is defined by the great wide floor they lay down.

Will you be planting a garden then, in the floodplain beneath your piers?

(By the by, among the curious anomalies of the previous century, E.D. sang this poem once at the MLA convention--down in your neck of the woods it was--accompanied by the itinerant High Plains slide guitarist Dobro Dick Dillof. I once had and then later lost a tape of the performance: as I recall it was reverent, elevated in tone, eerily wonderful and strange.)

The Flint Hills green as Irelandof a springpeopled with farmers too whocould not tolerate a crooked row,cowboys past and still todayrodeo towards the western glowAt night she strucka figure, the barrel racer withthe magenta shirt......from Molinerunning her stuffin Cedarvale Kansas againstthe silhouette of hills and grasses.